At 40, sale Dawn Pieke had just broken up with a live-in boyfriend who cheated on her, story but she was ready to have kids. She didn’t want an anonymous sperm donor — “because I hadn’t grown up with a dad myself, it was important to me to have my child know who their dad was.” So she started looking online, and eventually found a Facebook group devoted to something called coparenting.

“Single mothers by choice” have gotten a lot of attention in the past few years, and most discussions of single women — a topic of much recent scrutiny — include at least a nod toward women who go the sperm-donor route. But a growing number of single people want to have kids with someone else — and that person doesn’t have to be a romantic partner. Instead, it can be a coparent — someone they meet online or in life and agree to raise kids with, in a relationship that can be very close but isn’t sexual. And some coparents say this system has big advantages over the more traditional one.